1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed herein relates generally to methods and systems for digital mail management, and more particularly to a method and system for enabling the high speed processing of physical mail articles to convert the same into electronic documents that may be electronically distributed to the original intended recipient without requiring the intended recipient to come into contact with the original, physical mail article.
2. Description of the Background
Individuals, corporations, government entities, and every other party that receives mail has become increasingly concerned over the threat of contaminated mail. Terrorist events in the United States in 2001 relating to anthrax-laced mail have caused great concern, and at times near panic, over the health threat a person may realize simply by opening a new piece of mail. Since the realization that such a terrorist threat does truly exist, a need has been realized to implement a safeguard that could neutralize the threat of contaminated mail without degrading the general conveniences and limited costs associated with traditional mail delivery.
One avenue to reduce the risk posed by terrorist attempts to contaminate the mail is to prevent distribution of the physical, potentially contaminated mail article to the intended recipient. However, if such recipient is still to receive the information contained in the original mail document(s), a substitute for such physical article must be provided. Such a substitute may take the form of an electronic message including scanned images of the contents of the original, potentially contaminated mail article. In this case, the physical mail article may be delivered to a remote facility employing appropriate safety measures to neutralize the threat of possible contaminants, opened and scanned at such facility, and thereafter delivered digitally to the intended recipient. However, providing a viable digital delivery system, or a method or system for converting a large number of physical mail articles into a form which may be easily and accurately distributed electronically has heretofore not been accomplished.
More particularly, while high speed processing would require high speed scanning equipment that could process mail articles in batches, prior known methods and systems for digitizing mail articles have required the processing of each mail article through smaller, slower scanners because envelopes and their contents cannot be confidently scanned in batch mode. Batch scanning generally requires some consistency with thickness and size of the documents within the batch. Ordinarily, envelopes are thicker but smaller in size than their contents. Likewise, envelopes are generally open at the top end and must be scanned bottom first to prevent misfeeds. Thus, in order to prevent misfeeds, all documents in a batch must have their leading edges on the same line (with the closed envelope edge in the proper orientation) for feeding into a scanner. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult and time consuming to get the leading edges of a mixed batch of envelopes and contents (i.e., a batch comprised of envelopes and their contents interspersed with one another) to properly align. Therefore, it is more likely to get a scanner jam or double feed or scan out of order in a mixed batch. In a production scanning environment, it would thus be much more efficient to scan envelopes in batches and contents in other batches.
However, scanning envelopes and contents in their own separate batches provides its own difficulties. While address information is at times available on both the contents and the outside of the envelope in which they are shipped, there are often times when address information of the sender is only available on the envelope. Thus, if batches of envelopes and batches of contents are scanned separately, it is necessary that a process for synchronizing the data and images of the separate batches be provided.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a method and system for scanning mail documents separated into envelope and contents batches, while enabling synchronization of such scanning process to ensure association of all relevant data for each mail article.